Complaints

"The Many Complaints to Pharaoh of Rib-Addi of Byblos"

by Louise Pryke

published in Journal of the American Oriental Society, 131/3

The complaining client and the troubled therapist: A Discursive investigation of family therapy

by Michelle O'Reilly

(2005) Journal of Family Therapy 27: 371-393.

In this paper I examine two important issues for family therapy research. I attend to the concept of complaints,... more In this paper I examine two important issues for family therapy research. I attend to the concept of complaints, highlighting the conversational structure they take in a family therapy setting. I do this by outlining how clients construct their complaints and examining how the family therapist receives them. Data is taken from a corpus containing four different families and two different therapists and is subjected to discursive analysis in order to provide a rich analysis of not just what is happening in the talk but how it is happening. I conclude that complaints are not received as useful to the therapeutic process, despite their constructed importance to the client and therefore there are wider implications for therapy and professionals more generally, particularly implications for multi-agency communication.